Saturday, 26 September 2009

Inviting Critique

Trying to write an 'Artists (fucking) Statement' still. But an honest one. Any opinions welcome.

---------------

Statement

My pictures are always about reasons for living. Whether they show dreams, certainties, realities, fantasies, they have one thing in common: how to keep going in a world that is (and always has been before) becoming increasingly detached from any concept of spontaneous delight.

When I see something that makes me laugh, or think, or smile, or cry, I try to remember it, and sometimes take a picture. Sometimes they are thought about beforehand, othertimes in hindsight, and sometimes during the moment.

There is nothing special about what I do, except that I keep doing it, thinking it, and doing it again. My approach is always one of innocence. And I am lucky enough to have had a broad and amusing education: (child, climber, mountaineer, factory-boy, tramp, lover, poet, novelist, luthier, musician, painter, labourer, conservator, abseiling-medieval-sculpture-conservator-with-bells-attached, businessman, father, madman... among others). There is always something interesting in the world if you learn enough about the world first.

I use any medium that comes to hand. Sometimes for practical reasons. Sometimes to spite all the practical reasons. Any reason, so long as it gets to something that means tomorrow is viable.

I am allergic to bullshit, yet still remain a gentleman, a state of affairs which I am still old-fashioned enough to think important.

"My work reflects the trans-substantiation of the arguments of Voltaire's Candide into a post 20th Century construct undermined by a Lacanian invidiousnessististic bacalao matrix-" [BANG! Head hits desk, exeunt]

[Scene, man, rather dazed, writing at a desk. Unseen by him, a shovel poised behind his head]

[writes]

Conceptual dichotomies concerning the 'site' and the 'edge' weave post-ironic interstices into a quasi-positive field with reference to the later Krypolowskichurian Logicus-Revisionism. [BANG! Man slumps on desk again. Shovel returns to original position.]

Subscribe To

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,'Tis that our nature cannot always bringItself to apathy, which we must steepFirst in the icy depths of Lethe's springEre what we least wish to behold will sleep;Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.

~ George Gordon Noel Byron~ Don Juan, Canto IV, 4.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior. - Antonin Artaud